A Small Lie of Omission

I'm thirty-five and married, but also a nurse. One day, my wife wanted to know if I had any candy for the kids at work since she was baking cookies that week. She asked me as she handed over some bags to pack up with us when we went to visit her mom later in the day. Now here's where it gets tricky. We'd been there just days before, and I knew there wasn't any candy left on the floor of my little station near the nurses' desk. But something in me didn’t want her to know how messy that station had become with charts and junk strewn everywhere, I really should have thrown out old paperwork by now, but it’s always a chore to do. So I lied to cover for the state of things. I told my wife there was no candy left because we'd given it all away earlier in the week to some local kids who were doing a bake sale. It felt like such a small fib, I wasn’t hiding anything illegal or morally questionable, just avoiding having her see how lazy I've been with that space behind my desk. But here’s the kicker: she asked me if there was any chance someone had stopped by to drop off candy for us when they knew we were visiting family. I lied again and said probably not since I hadn’t seen them. My wife took it at face value, thinking maybe she wouldn't bake as many cookies now that our snack supply seemed sparse. I felt awful lying to her about something so trivial and knowing there was no candy at all due to my messiness and disorganization. It’s just one of those things where the lie is born out of convenience but grows in your gut until it’s a heavy burden you know has to be confessed someday.